Krosno is the most renown center of industrial glass production in Poland. During a visit to the Glass Heritage Center, you may see for yourself how Krosno glass production works, or even blow a glass dish yourself.
For 90 years glass was the focal point of the city. Apart from the most famous KROSNO Glassworks, there are a dozen or so smaller works, plants and artistic workshops.
Opened in 2012, the Glass Heritage Center in Krosno is in an attractive place at the Old Town’s Market. It tells the story of the rich traditions and reveals the technical secrets of the modern production of this transparent material.
Over the course of less than 2 years the center sold about 90,000 tickets. The center organizes many events that don’t need purchasing a ticket. So the number of visitors is much higher. The huge interest in the exhibition places GHC among leading centers in the south of Poland.
The fact that you can see for yourself how the glass production takes place, that you can take part in workshops and blow a glass bubble that is 1,200 degrees Celsius yourself, are the unique selling points of the center.
Glass-making technology is spectacular, yet casual observers are rarely allowed to take a look at it. In the center you can see it in detail, and take part in the process yourself. It’s a unique experience not only in Poland, but in Europe, too.
Exhibitions, concerts and shows
Besides glass-making shows, HGC offers a glass art exhibition and a lesson in the history of the glass industry. Visitors can see collections of modern glass art made by artists not only from Krosno, but also from other European glass-making centers, such as the Venetian Murano works.
Learning glass physics and conducting experiments on glass props, such as lenses, kaleidoscopes or optic fibers, might also be an interesting experience. The center is the venue of many concerts and 3D mapping shows.
GHC was the initiator behind the Glass Route set at the Krosno’s Old Town, comprising a dozen or so glass sculptures and touching upon the local legends. This route is available followed in a special tourist line. Every year GHC holds MultiGlass Festival that takes place within the Night of Museums movement.
Exhibitions, workshops and shows that organized during the event are open to everyone for free. Support from European Funds helped building The Glass Heritage Center.
Bishop’s Palace Krosno
The palace is in the Late Renaissance style. This former representational residences of the Latin Catholic Bishops of Przemyśl, is an important element of the historical development of Krosno.
History
One of the first residences of the Bishops of Przemyśl in Krosno was a wooden manor house. The Ordinary of the Przemyśl Diocese, Erik von Winsenbought bought it in the last quarter of the 14th century.
In the 2nd half of the 16th century the house abutting on the municipal defensive wall expanded. In 1626, Bishop Achacy Grochowski relinquished the place to the Chapter of Przemyśl.
The Chapter of Przemyśl sold the palace in 1630 the palace to Zofia Skotnicka nee Ligęza, widow of Jan Skotnicki, a Castellan of Połaniec. After the 1638 Krosno fire, the palace building was subject to renovation and construction works that came to completion in 1646.
Zofia Skotnicka relinquished the reconstructed palace with a wooden wing in the north to the College of Rorantists in Krosno. The College of Vicars in Krosno owned the palace from 1745 on.
Around 1770 the wooden, northern wing of the palace was demolished. Józef Dembowski became a new owner of the former Palace of Bishops in 1841, while in 1873 the town took over property of the building.
In the 1880’s the building shortly housed barracks of troops of the Imperial and Royal Army, while from 1884 a court had its seat there. In 1893 the building was altered. At that time a masonry northern wing, an avant-corps with a staircase in the east and new corridors on the ground floor and the first floor were constructed.
Between 1987-1994 the entire building underwent renovation, adding a new eastern wing as well. From 1954 on, the old Palace of Bishops housed the Regional Museum. Currently, the Museum of Subcarpathia occupies the building.
Description
The palace is in the central part of Krosno, on a parcel on the edge of the Old Town’s escarpment, in the vicinity of relics of defensive walls and the Krakow Gate. Its front faces to the south-west, towards the former Hungarian Tract, now Piłsudski Street.
The palace’s construction combines three rectangles connected with one another to form a polygon, with an enfilade arrangement of the interior.
At the front, the building has one and a half bays and one bay in the south-eastern wing. The building includes an avant-corps housing a staircase in the front wing. The feature has two stories, a basement and a simple body composed of three elongated cuboids.
A shed roof covers the south-eastern wing, erected on the border of the parcel, while a gable roof covers the northern wing.
Later expansions along the northern border of the parcel belonging to the Bishops joined the parts of the building, forming a courtyard inside. The palace is from brick and stone, while copper sheet covers the roofs.
The front facade, facing to the south-west, forms a long section of the frontage. It has two floors, eleven axes and a gate to the pass-through vestibule.
Profiled window surrounds with a window sill accentuate the windows, arranged along axes and, additionally on the second story, with cornices above windows. Pilasters supporting a triangular pediment with a niche containing a figure in the middle frame the gate. Two stone escutcheons were laid on both sides. A pronounced crowning cornice crowns the front facade.
Other facades inside the courtyard include no decorations. The rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor as well as the pass-through vestibule feature surviving barrel vaults with lunettes.
The building is accessible during opening hours of the Museum of Subcarpathia.
Carpathian Troy in Trzcinica near Krosno
One of Europe’s biggest open-air museums, Carpathian Troy, is near the town of Jaslo. On the eight-hectare site visitors can see fragments of fortifications from the Bronze Age.
There’s also a Slavic village, and a hamlet before inhabited by people of the Ottomány culture who settled here in 1650 BC. They maintained trade links with ancient Troy and Mycenae, supplying amber to the Mediterranean.
The settlement thanks its name Carpathian Troy partly because of these Mediterranean links. But there are more similarities to the eponymous ancient city.
The fortified town built in Trzcinica in the 8th century AD was as big as Troy. It suffered a similar fate by being burnt down as a result of a popular revolt around 1030.